Space RF communication protocols and best-use technologies - I need to read about it more

You can get a decent primer on this topic here and here. If you aren’t already a licensed ham, you can look into getting your Technician license (a lofty goal, given the exam comprises thirty whole multiple-choice questions) and get familiar with transmitting/receiving across long distances.

One fun experiment you can tackle early on before even getting licensed to transmit is to just receive signals from satellites that are already in orbit and can be reliably tracked. For example: you can easily track the International Space Station and know when it will be passing over your location and set up a receiver to listen on the right frequency. It’s not uncommon for them to be broadcasting some kind of signal on a regular basis. Sometimes they even broadcast SSTV signals that you can receive and decode. Once you’ve done this a couple of times, you oughta be pretty comfortable with at least receiving signals from satellites in orbit. Good preliminary proof of concept.

A couple of handy web apps I’ve used to track satellites before:

• in-the-sky.org/satmap_radar.php
• www.n2yo.com/satellites/?c=18
• www.heavens-above.com

You used to be able to track the ISS through a NASA web app, but they recently retired it in favor of their first-party app 🙄. Admittedly, it’s a pretty great app in my experience. But I wish the old web app were still online. That said, the apps I linked above should also be able to track the ISS as well.